Turner prize 2018: art that asks timely, probing questions

No one can say that this year’s Turner prize shortlist is an irrelevant, footling parade of art-world luvvies. What an interesting, serious and timely shortlist it is. Politics, personal as much as global, spatial as much as temporal, are at the core of the selected artists’ work. All, to greater and lesser degrees, use film and digital imagery – in extremely different ways. Not all the names are familiar.

Forensic Architecture interrogate not so much architecture as space itself – the spaces between walls and windows, roads and buildings, borders and intentions. Space is political as much as geographic. It is contested, defended and attacked. The path of a ricocheting bullet, the sound a particular gun makes, the pattern of a bomb blast: the Forensic Architecture group analyse and reconstruct, build real and virtual models, quartering territories and presenting evidence, sometimes in galleries and art exhibitions, sometimes in court. The question might be the degree to which what they do is art at all. One might say that even a still life or a portrait can be forensic, although the group itself disputes the term. They seem to operate between disciplines, describing the world, and events, in ways that are genuinely innovative, useful and new.

Using filmed portraiture, Luke Willis Thompson looks instead at the aftermath of violence, police brutality and murder, and gives us images of damaged lives. I take his filmed portraits as images of fortitude and dignity. What is unseen affects the way we regard the presence of Brandon, grandson of Dorothy “Cherry” Groce, who was shot and paralysed by police when they raided her home, and Graeme, son of Jamaican mature student Joy Gardner, who died of cardiac arrest after being arrested, bound and gagged by police who were attempting to deport her from the UK. Thompson’s Autoportrait has Diamond Reynolds as its subject. Her boyfriend was shot dead by police in Minnesota, an event she witnessed and captured using her phone.

Naeem Mohaiemen’s work is the least familiar to me, and deals with the legacies of colonialism and the paradoxes of revolutionary struggle. Lives are stranded, ideals distorted by contingency. Mohaiemen’s idiosyncratic art unpicks the complexities of the lives he describes in his highly personal films.

A still from Bridgit, 2016, by Charlotte Prodger. Photograph: Charlotte Prodge/Koppe Astner/PA

I have followed Charlotte Prodger’s work for some years now. She seems the most poetic voice here, with her diaristic recent films and stories. There is something mysterious about the way she presents her work, the great care with which she stages the conditions that her spectators find themselves in to view her films. One of the works she was nominated for, Stoneymollan Trail, takes us from Nancy Holt’s land art in the Utah desert to a coffin road outside Glasgow; from Nina Simone playing at Montreux to the black, gay science fiction writer Samuel Delany’s memoir. Both here and in other works, Prodger gives us scenes from her own life alongside the things that have enthralled and affected her: wild places in nature, discos (she has also worked as a DJ), other people’s lives, her own stories. I love the possibilities her work opens up, for memoir and storytelling, candour and fiction. For once I am really looking forward to this year’s Turner prize show, to things I need to see.